Not only did I lack a religious upbringing to credit with my adult chastity, but I was actually ahead of my peers in hitting other early adulthood milestones (abusing cocaine, distrusting capitalism), so being a virgin classified me as an oddity that required explanation.
On Sunday, when she becomes one of this year's crop of 1,600 graduates of Stanford University, Chelsea Victoria Clinton will pass an irretrievable milestone of adulthood in a nation that watched her grow up in wordless pantomime.
Nonetheless, even though many of us are starting to note signposts of approaching dotage, we have not entirely crossed off our last milestone of adulthood, raising our children to their own unsteady self-sufficiency.
Many linked this to some chronological milestone of adulthood, such as graduating high school or starting college.
Younger workers would get stuck in dead-end careers, if they could find careers at all, and fall behind on milestones of adulthood such as homeownership and marriage.
As millennials struggle with student loans and finding jobs within their preferred professions, they are putting off some of the other milestones of adulthood, such as marriage: only three in 10 millennials have ever been married.
Over and over, we are bombarded with evidence that Gen Y is living at home longer, delaying marriage and failing to achieve economic independence and other milestones of adulthood.
In other words, if we want millennials to achieve all the traditional milestones of adulthood — for moral, sentimental or economic reasons — we have to give them the financial opportunities to responsibly do so.
But what Gibson wrote about products was just as true about other, less visible trends in Japanese society: economic stagnation; a plunging fertility rate; a dramatic postponement of the "normal" milestones of adulthood, such as getting married or simply moving out of the family home; a creeping sense of ambivalence about what the future might hold.
Low incomes, coupled with rising living costs, debt and a lack of employment mean that some of us are not only unlikely to fulfil our more inventive childhood fantasies, but will fail to meet even the basic milestones of adulthood: a full-time permanent job, a life partner, a home, a pension and earning enough every month to put something into a savings account.
